The aim of the research has been to investigate how and what kinds of relational and shared practices were co-created within a multi-cultural team in a higher education collaborative learning environment. The students interacted while working towards the shared goal of co-constructing knowledge. The study provides insight into how student teams can actively build collaboration in learning spaces through manifesting relational leadership. A compound theoretical framework combining relational leadership ( Komives et al., 2013) and leadership trichotomy (Snook et al. 2012) was adapted to study what factors enable shared and relational practices. The perspective that leadership is situated in interactions can be associated with the term relational leadership and constitutes an effort to view leadership as embedded in rich human connections and interdependencies among members in an organization (Denis et al. 2012; Uhl-Bien 2006). Consequently, the concept of relational leadership was used as the first theoretical framework to examine shared and relational practices in co-constructing knowledge. In relational leadership, the interdependencies among team members leads to an emerging social order (Hosking 1988). Hence, leadership is not restricted to hierarchical roles but occurs in dynamic relations throughout an organization, among a group of people. When the focus on individual attributes associated with leadership is removed, the attention shifts to exploring the ways by which members collaborate and move relationally through dialogue with each other (McNamee 2012). Here, shared and relational practice became the focus. This study adds a fresh perspective, specifically relational and shared practices executed in collaboration. These practices are examined through a leadership ‘trichotomy model’ of knowing-being-doing (Komives et al. 2013; Snook et al. 2012). In applying this model, we gain understanding of how a multicultural group functioned as a team and achieved its purposes in collaboration through shared and relational practices. The reason to conduct the study among a multicultural group of students was to examine the phenomenon in an environment that requires a deeper sense of relational connection and interdependence, integrated through shared and relational practices. 

The study was conducted in a particular learning environment called the Collaboratories Lab in a university setting in Finland, with a group of multicultural students whose learning interactions were led by inquiry and deep questioning. The lab provided an adequate context within which to examine shared and relational practices and, in particular, the factors that enabled the students to flourish despite inevitable barriers. In these times of complex global challenges, we need to focus on building teams that have the ability to make cognitively complex decisions and adapt to multiple worldviews. It is evident that leadership is a collective process that can be found among many different groups of individuals on university campuses. Our findings indicate how a group of students working together became relational leaders and overcame barriers to collaboration through relational practices. This study also adds emphasis to the ways in which learning environments serve as nourishing spaces in the formation of relational leaders who can go on to become future change agents. Finally, the findings provide fresh perspectives for building stronger learning relationships on campuses among multicultural learning communities. In this way, higher education institutions could better prepare their students to be competent, both in their lives and in their work within the global society.The results of the study could provide new insights for other kinds of higher educational learning environments in Europe and beyond where there is an increasing trend in multicultural student groups.

The paper is based on an international study course called the Collaboratories Lab. The Collaboratories Lab was a self-designed intervention designed by the author where students worked towards building knowledge capital on collaboration. The main element of the course was to introduce collaborative activities centered on education that involved working in small groups or as a class. Dialogue was an integral part of these activities. This was followed by an online discussion with reflections based on students’ face-to-face learning experiences, around their experiences of working in groups. In the Collaboratories Lab, the students engaged in immersive collaborative activities enabled through multimodal engagement, such as collaborative games, theater, appreciative inquiry, art and dialogue.The data for this paper include students’ individual and group reflections on the discussion forum and their final learning assignment, which was to assemble a collaboration tool kit meant to aid their future roles in education. Their face-to-face group discussions were audio- and video-recorded. The audio recordings were transcribed into text, and thematic data analysis was conducted. Data coding and analysis followed the thematic analysis model suggested by Braun and Clarke( 2006). The thematic analysis was conducted deductively so that existing theoretical concepts informed the coding and theme development, allowing the analysis to move beyond the obvious meanings in the data. The themes were derived by connecting the relational leadership model and the knowing-doing-being model, in accordance with Komives et al. (2013). The data were first scrutinised through the lens of these models so that existing criss-crossed conceptualisations informed the coding and theme development.Two major themes of co-sensing and co-shaping as shared and relational practices arose from the thematic analysis.

Our main findings suggest that the major practices of co-sensing and co-shaping, embedded with many shared and relational practices, provide higher education student teams with effective learning and knowledge construction in a collaborative, socially constructed learning environment. Even though the sample size was limited, and the findings of this study cannot be generalized to different higher education contexts, it is important to note that the multicultural student group demonstrated effective shared and relational practices while functioning as relational leaders to lead themselves to their shared goal. Thus, the findings might provide valuable insights into how to foster relational leaders in other higher education contexts. The findings also highlight the expanding mind-set that individual students bring to leadership through shared and relational practices and contradict the idea that leadership is situated only in hierarchies or among students who are presidents of university organizations. Hence, the findings suggest that leadership and collaborative learning can co-exist in higher education classrooms.

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